On one side of the struggle over the disengagement plan is the colossus of Israeli politics, Ariel Sharon, and about 75% of the public. On the other side are the settlers and the rest of the hardcore Right. As far as I'm concerned, this one is no contest – the minority is going to absolutely crush the majority.

Sharon says that by the end of 2005 there will be no Jews living in Gaza; I say that at the end of 2005 there will be more Jews living in Gaza than there are today. The reason boils down to what might be called the "motivation gap."

Ask yourself how many Israelis would be willing to die to stop settlements from being uprooted. If I had to guess, I'd say there are at least a couple of dozen such fanatics, and as Sharon goes forward with his preparations and the struggle heats up, their number will increase.

Now ask yourself how many Israelis would be willing to die so that the settlements in Gaza and a few of them in the West Bank could be dismantled, as the disengagement plan calls for. Obviously the answer is zero.

If you carry this further and compare the readiness on each side to get bloodied in protests, to go to jail, to go on hunger strikes, to block highways – to extend themselves in any of a thousand ways to achieve their political goal – then it becomes clear which political camp has the power and which one doesn't.

In the dispute over the settlements, the will of the majority is not tested over the telephone by pollsters. Three out of five Likud members interviewed in April by telephone pollsters said they supported the disengagement plan, but the only members who counted were those with the will to go out and vote in the May referendum; and of those, three out of five voted "No."

The settler movement's extraordinary victory in the Likud referendum was a preview of what's in store for Israel over the next several months, or maybe a year, or however long it takes the settlers to scare off this latest attempt to roll them back.

And there's nothing at all undemocratic about what they're doing. They don't need an assassin in their ranks to prevail; in fact, another assassination by a right-wing extremist, certainly the assassination of Sharon, would take the wind out of the settler movement's sails and light a fire under the pro-disengagement forces.

No, the movement's surefire strategy is psychological warfare, "winning through intimidation." They will be pushing their crying children to the front, holding up photos of their murdered loved ones, shouting about their blood-drenched land, about rewarding terrorists, about expelling brave Jews from their homes, about the beginning of the end of Israel, about another Holocaust.

And they will be everywhere.

No Israeli is going to want to meet their eyes. None but the most committed leftists will go out into the street to campaign for getting out of the settlements, and these will be a polite few, easily outdone by any three or four extremists happy to shout "traitor" and "kapo" at them.

The voice of the pragmatic majority will be intimidated into silence and thus neutralized as a political force. The voice of the settlers and their allies will be the loudest and fiercest in the land by far – much stronger than that of Sharon, who effectively will be fighting on his own, as nobody listens to the Left anymore.

The pragmatic majority – all the Israelis who believe in the path of least resistance– will find that the path of disengagement from Gaza is on fire with resistance. The discomfort that comes from defying the settlers will seem much sharper, and more immediate, than the discomfort that comes from accommodating them. Better to back off, to wait, to let things calm down, to give in. We don't want a civil war, after all.

That's how I see the politics of the disengagement plan playing out at the popular level; at the parliamentary level, the hardcore Right's campaign has already turned Sharon into a prime minister without a party.

Whatever coalition monkey business he succeeds in pulling off, Sharon cannot take down settlements without the Likud behind him; and as push comes to shove, as Likud fence-sitters are being accused and shamed by settler activists wherever they go, how many Likud ministers or MKs will go to the wall for disengagement? For a policy that they may see as a pragmatic necessity but that violates their deepest nationalistic instincts?

Maybe Ehud Olmert, maybe Shaul Mofaz, maybe Tzipi Livni, but that's about it. And once these maverick types see how alone they are, how their Likud colleagues are either campaigning against disengagement or keeping quiet about it, how much fighting spirit will they have?

How much fighting spirit do they have today?

I don't blame the hardcore right-wing minority, I blame the majority: the huge blob of Israeli pragmatists, along with the numbed-out ranks of the Left.

Even with their far superior numbers, they are no match for the true believers who are prepared to do whatever it takes to defend their belief.

The country's internal dispute over the future of the settlements has to do with things like religion, nationalism, land, home, and blood. In such a dispute, pragmatism is strictly for losers.